Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Significant details of
a legal negotiation between HTC and Apple Inc.(NASDAQ:AAPL) may go public after
a California judge rules his verdict.

The US District Judge
Lucy Koh has said that even though the pricing and royalty rates for patents
from both the companies must be kept a secret from the public, the rest of the
agreement can come out of the wraps.

Koh mentioned in a
ruling that the court has time and again explained that only the royalty and
pricing terms must be kept under the wraps. There are convincing reasons to
seal pricing and royalty terms since they may put the parties associated with
the agreement in a significant disadvantage in negotiations that may happen in
the future. However, there is no problem in making the remaining portion of the
agreement public.

This pertains to a
number of patents that were part of the settlement agreement announced the
previous month. The agreement had made peace with between HTC and Apple after a
dreary legal fight.

The court has explained
that the only sealable terms under the license agreement are the royalty and
payment terms. Hence, the numbers of patents that are included in the agreement
fail to meet the standards of ‘compelling reasons’.

It was late last month
when Samsung’s outside lawyers were allowed to go through the confidential
details of the agreement. Samsung specifically had said that it intended on
seeing the patents that were covered in the agreement as there were chances of
them getting overlapped with the ones that were used in its case with Apple.

One of the lawyers of
Samsung said that the license has straight bearing on the question of permanent
harm and whether monetary remedies are enough.

However, the license
could also reveal if Apple had covered some of its unique user experience
patents, the ones that it normally does not share with other companies.